Emperor of Ocean Park eh-1

by Stephen L Carter

  (I)

  The following Tuesday, twelve days after the death of my father, I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues-leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on The Challenge of Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term-all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.

  Or maybe I am just measuring their prospects by my own.

  My family and I returned to Elm Harbor last Thursday after my brief interview at Corcoran amp; Klein with real agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cassie Meadows surprisingly mature and competent at my side. Kimmer went straight back to work, instantly resuming her manic pace and crazy hours, and has already made another trip to San Francisco, for the greater wealth and glory of EHP. The real FBI has had no success in tracking down the two men who confronted me at Shepard Street, but my wife has persuaded herself that they were reporters, looking for dirt. She does not care whether she persuades me.

  Mariah, meanwhile, has a new theory. It is no longer Jack Ziegler who killed the Judge; it is a litigant who blames my father for rejecting some appeal; and she is undaunted by the fact that the Judge left the bench well over a decade ago. “Probably a big corporation,” she insisted last night on the phone, her third call in five days. “You have no idea how amoral they are. Or how long they can hold a grudge.” I wondered what Howard would say to that, but prudently bit my tongue. Mariah added that a friend of hers had agreed to search the Internet for possible hired killers. But when I challenged Mariah gently, she scolded me all over again for never standing by her in the clutch.

  “Sisters are just like that,” said Rob Saltpeter, the spindly constitutional-futurist who is my occasional basketball partner, when I related part of the story while we sat in the locker room yesterday morning at the Y, the two of us having been slaughtered by a couple of off-duty cops. His eyes, as always, were serene. “But, the thing is, you have to remember that she would stand by you in the clutch.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Rob smiled. At six feet five he has four inches on me, but I probably outweigh him by fifty pounds. Although not, yet, quite fat, I am more than a little bit overweight; he is terribly thin. Neither one of us is an impressive sight in Jockey shorts in a locker room.

  “Just a sense that I get.”

  “You’ve never even met her.”

  “I have two sisters,” objected Rob, whose fundamental warmth is tempered by a zealous certainty that all families are, or should be, like his own.

  “Not like Mariah.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she’s like. Your obligation to be there for her is exactly the same no matter what. It doesn’t come from her behavior. It doesn’t come from what you think of her. It comes from the fact that you are her brother.”

  “I thought we abolished status-based relationships about a century ago,” I teased, a typically silly lawyer’s inside joke. In a status-based relationship, the parties’ obligations are determined by who they are (husband-wife, parent-child, master-servant, and so on), rather than by agreement.

  “Man abolished them. God didn’t.”

  Nothing much to say to that, and I suppose I agree. Rob is, by his own description, an observant Jew, and he talks about his faith more than any other professor I know, including, to the squirmy chagrin of many students, in the classroom. Perhaps it is this oracular side of Rob Saltpeter that keeps us from becoming closer friends. Or perhaps it is simply that I am not a friendly fellow. To cover an unexpected surge of pain, I asked him for advice.

  “Nothing to do but go on,” he shrugged, which is his answer for just about everything.

  Well, fine. I am going on. Badly.

  And so it is that on this, my first day back in the classroom, I find myself persecuting an unfortunate young man whose sin is to inform us all that the cases I expect my students to master are irrelevant, because the rich guys always win. Now, it is true that some poor fool announces this conclusion every fall, and it is also true that more than a few professors have earned tenure at some very fine law schools by pressing refined, jargon-chunky versions of precisely this thin theory, but I am in no mood for blather. I glare at the cocky student and see, for a horrible moment, the future, or maybe just the enemy: young, white, confident, foolish, skinny, sullen, multiply pierced, bejeweled, dressed in grunge, cornsilk hair in a ponytail, utterly the cynical conformist, although he thinks he is an iconoclast. A few generations ago, he would have been the fellow wearing his letterman’s sweater inside out, to prove to everybody how little it meant to him. When I was in college, he would have been first to the barricades, and he would have made sure everybody saw him there. As he is sure everybody is looking at him now. His elbow is on his chair, his other fist is tucked under his chin, and I read in his posture insolence, challenge, perhaps even the unsubtle racism of the supposedly liberal white student who cannot quite bring himself to believe that his black professor could know more than he. About anything. A light frosty red dances around his face like a halo, and I catch myself thinking, I could break him. I remind myself to be gentle.

  “Very interesting, Mr. Knowland,” I smile, taking a few steps down the aisle toward the row in which he sits. I fold my arms. “Now, how does your very interesting thesis relate to the case at hand?”

  Still leaning back, he shrugs, barely meeting my gaze. He tells me that my question is beside the point. It is not the legal rules that matter, he explains to the ceiling, but the fact that workers cannot expect justice from the capitalist courts. It is the structure of the society, not the content of the rules, that leads to oppression. He may even be half right, but none of it is remotely relevant, and his terminology seems as outdated as a powdered wig. I pull an old pedagogical trick, inching closer to crowd his field of vision, forcing him to remember which of us is in a position of authority. I ask him whether he recalls that the case at hand involves not an employee suing an employer but one motorist suing another. Mr. Knowland, twisted around in his chair, answers calmly that such details are distractions, a waste of our time. He remains unwilling to look at me. His posture screams disrespect, and everybody knows it. The classroom falls silent; even the usual sounds of pages turning and fingers clacking on laptop keyboards and chairs scraping disappear. The red deepens. I recall that I had to upbraid him three weeks ago for fooling around with his Palm Pilot during class. I was circumspect then, taking care to call him over after the hour ended. Still, he was angry, for he is of the generation that assumes that there are no rules but those each individual wills. Now, through the crimson haze, my student begins to resemble Agent McDermott as he sat, lying through his teeth, in the living room at Shepard Street… and, very suddenly, it is too late t
o stop. Smiling as insolently as Mr. Knowland, I ask him whether he has undertaken a study of the tort cases, sorting them by the relative wealth of the parties, to learn the truth or falsity of his theory. Glaring, he admits that he has not. I ask him whether he is aware of any such study performed by anybody else. He shrugs. “I will take that as a no,” I say, boring into him now. Standing right in front of his table, I tell him that there is, in fact, a substantial literature on the effect of wealth on the outcome of cases. I ask him if he has read any of it. The antiquated fluorescent lights buzz and hiss uncertainly as we wait for Mr. Knowland’s reply. He looks around the classroom at the pitying faces of his classmates, he looks up at the portraits of prominent white male graduates that line the walls, and at last he looks back at me.

  “No,” he says, his voice much smaller.

  I nod as though to say I knew it all along. Then I cross the line. As every mildly competent law professor knows, this is the point at which I should segue smoothly back into the discussion of the case, perhaps teasing Mr. Knowland a little by asking another student to act as his co-counsel, in order to help him out of the jam into which he has so foolishly talked himself. Instead, I give him my back and move two paces away from his seat, then whirl and point and ask him whether he often offers opinions that have no basis in fact. His eyes widen, in frustration and childlike hurt. He says nothing, opens his mouth, then shuts it again, because he is trapped: no answer that he can give will help him. He looks away again as his classmates try to decide whether they should laugh. (Some do, some do not.) My head pounds redly and I ask: “Is that what they taught you at-Princeton, wasn’t it?” This time, the students are too shocked to laugh. They do not really like the arrogant Mr. Avery Knowland, but now they like the arrogant Professor Talcott Garland even less. In the abrupt, nervous silence of the high-ceilinged classroom, it strikes me, far too late, that I, a tenured professor at one of the best law schools in the land, am in the process of humiliating a twenty-two-year-old who was, all of five years ago, in high school-the campus equivalent of a sixth-grade bully beating up a kindergartner. It does not matter if Avery Knowland is arrogant or ignorant or even if he is racist. My job is to teach him, not to embarrass him. I am not doing my job.

  My rampant demons have chased me even into my classroom.

  I soften once more. And try to clean up the mess. Of course, I continue, tweedily pacing the front of the room, lawyers are occasionally called upon to argue what they cannot prove. But-and here I spin and stiletto my finger again toward Mr. Knowland- but, when they offer these unsupported and unsupportable arguments, they must do so with verve. And they must have the confidence, when asked about the factual basis of their claims, to do the courtroom polka, which I demonstrate as I repeat the simple instructions: sidestep, sidestep, sidestep, stay on your toes, and never, ever face the music.

  Relieved, jittery laughter from the students.

  Except a glaring Avery Knowland.

  I am able to finish the class, even to summon a bit of dignity, but I flee to my office the instant noon arrives, furious at myself for allowing my demons to drive me to embarrass a student in class. The incident will reinforce my reputation around the law school- not a nice person, the students tell each other, and Dana Worth, the faculty’s foremost connoisseur of student gossip, cheerfully repeats it to me-and maybe the reputation is the reality.

  (II)

  My office is on the second floor of the main law school building, called Oldie by most of the faculty and all of the students, not because it is old, although it is, but because it was built with an endowment from and is named for the Oldham family. Merritt Oldham, who grew up with money-his grandfather invented some sort of firing pin during the Civil War and, according to legend, died when the faulty prototype of an improved version caused a gun to explode in his face-was graduated from the law school around the dawn of the twentieth century and went on to Wall Street glory as a founder of the law firm of Grace, Grand, Oldham amp; Fair. When I was a law student, Grace, Grand sat at the top of the New York heap, but it came down hard in the Drexel Burnham scandal in the eighties. Two of its hottest partners went to the penitentiary, three more were forced to resign, and the rest fell to squabbling over the corpse. The firm finally split in two. One half went under within a few years; the other, retaining the Oldham name, is still afloat, but barely, and our students, who memorize the relative rankings in prestige of every Manhattan law firm long before they master even the rudiments of tort law, would sooner go hungry than work there.

  The firm may have collapsed, but our building is still Oldie-formally, the Veronica Oldham Law Center. Merritt adored his sainted mother, never married, never had children, and is claimed by our gay students as one of their own, probably with reason, if a fraction of the stories Theo Mountain tells are true. The Law Center sits on a grassy hill at the end of Town Street, looking down over the city. It comprises two square blocks, north and south of Eastern Avenue, joined by a pedestrian bridge. The southern block, with a view toward the main campus, is Oldie, a vaguely Gothic structure with three floors of offices on its east side and six floors of library on the west, joined by a row of classrooms to the south and a high stone wall to the north, all surrounding the lovely flagstone courtyard that is probably the school’s greatest aesthetic attraction. The northern block of the Center, added twenty years ago on the site of an old Roman Catholic church that was devastated by fire and purchased by a clever dean, includes a large, rather spartan dormitory housing nearly half our students, and a low, ugly brick building (formerly the parish school) crammed with offices for all our student organizations except the most prestigious, the law review. This arrangement causes a bit of jealousy, but we have no choice: our alumni, like alumni everywhere, regard change as the enemy of memory, and would never allow us to evict the law review from its traditional warren of rooms on the first floor of the faculty wing.

  To reach my office, one climbs the central marble staircase and, at the second floor, turns left, trudges to the end of the dreary corridor with its peeling linoleum floor, turns left again, and counts four doors down on the left. Immediately before my office is a large room housing four faculty secretaries, not including my own, who sits, thanks to some fascinating bit of administrative reasoning, on the third floor in another corner of the building. Beyond my office is the den of Amy Hefferman, the ageless Princess of Procedure, much beloved of the students, who talks every year or so of retirement, then relents when the graduating class votes her commencement speaker; directly across the hall is young Ethan Brinkley, who has the habit, without warning, of dropping by to share implausible stories of his three years as deputy counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; next to him, in a room little larger than Kimmer’s walk-in closet, sits the even younger Matthew Goffe, who teaches a course on corporations, a course on secured transactions, and a course on radical alternatives to the rule of law. Matt is one of our few untenured faculty members and, unless he discontinues his disconcerting habit of signing every student petition and joining every student boycott, is likely to remain in that category. Next along, in the northwest corner of the building, is the vast chamber occupied by Stuart Land, the former dean and, probably, the most widely respected intellect on the faculty, who teaches a little bit of everything, commands the services of two secretaries, and makes the reputation of the law school his special concern. Stuart, say the corridor gossips, has never quite recovered from the palace coup that led to his ouster and Dean Lynda’s elevation, a revolution more about politics than about policies-for Stuart’s unapologetic conservatism left him constantly at war with Theo Mountain and Marc Hadley and Tish Kirschbaum and many other powers on the faculty.

  Or so it is rumored.

  But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the s
chool. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni-more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.

  The hallways of Oldie are warm and familiar. I like it here.

  Most of the time.

  Today, however, when I turn the final corner toward my office after my unfortunate class, I encounter an agitated Dana Worth, rapping imperiously on my office door, as though irritated that I am not present to open it. She rattles the knob, pushes, then pulls. Cupping a hand above her eyes, she peers through the frosted glass, even though the darkness within is plainly visible.

  I look on in amusement, then concern, for I have not seen Dana this upset since the day she told me she was leaving my friend Eddie. .. and then told me why.

  Dana, who teaches contracts and intellectual property, is one of our stars, even though her diminutive stature invariably tempts a few unfortunate first-year students to think they can walk all over her. Dana comes from an old Virginia family that once had lots of money (read slaves) but lost it in what she laughingly calls “the late unpleasantness.” She lives delightfully, even charmingly, in a world centered on herself. (“Your sister died in a car wreck? You know, back at the University of Virginia, I used to date a man who died in a car wreck. He was a McMichael, of the Rappahannock County McMichaels.” Reminded that my father actually knew the senior McMichael, the Senator, knew him quite well once upon a time, Dana would be undeterred: “But not the way I knew his son, I’m willing to bet.”)

  Dana, three years older than I am, has survived, even transcended, the minor scandal of the way her marriage broke up. Eddie, whose life around the university was lived largely in his wife’s shadow, left us last year to return to his native Texas, where, he insists, the kind of thing that happened to him in Elm Harbor would not be allowed. (He does not say who would stop it.) His departure reduced the law school’s black faculty by twenty-five percent. Dana left him for a woman named Alison Frye, a nervous, fleshy New Yorker, all carroty hair and burning anger at the world. Alison is a novelist of slight accomplishment and runs a Web site full of airy but erudite social commentary, most with a “new economy” spin. Her courtship of Dana was a more or less public event, at least among the techie crowd. Three years ago, back when their affair was still secret, Alison posted on her site a composition entitled “Dear Dana Worth,” a love letter of sorts, which was downloaded and e-mailed all over the world, and, more important, all over the campus-Dana likes to say that Alison mortified her into falling in love. Many of us have adopted the essay’s title as a teasing nickname, although her husband understandably missed the humor. When Dana and Eddie were married, Kimmer and I hung around with them a lot, for Eddie and I played together as children. Eddie’s parents are old family friends, and he may even be a distant cousin on my mother’s side, although we never quite worked it out.